Lepopisana

The Black Square is a painting by Kazimir Malevich, one of the four, painted in 1915. Malevich declared it a work of Suprematism, a movement in Russian art between futurism and constructivism. He said that the painting is meant to evoke "the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing." There's nothing physical in it, no bodily experience, no real world. Or so the scholars say. I remember a man sitting at a desk in a house above the polar circle. He is writing a letter to a friend living in New York, a totally different world, trying to describe what he sees through the window. The room is dark, only the desk lamp casts its yellow light over the table's surface. He stares at his reflection in the window. He's annoyed with the view, the annoyance can be heard in his voice. There's nothing to see except a big black void. He says the words several times over: "Deep black void." Silence presses on the window pa...

I read some thoughts by John Fowles, concerning his novel The French Lieutenant's Woman. He said he had the image during the autumn of 1966 of "A woman who stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to the sea." Back in the 80s I saw a film with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, made after the book. I forgot most of the story, in fact I forgot almost everything. Except one scene, a woman standing at the end of the quay, her dress caught by the wind. She seemed lonely and I remember thinking she must have been waiting for someone. In my memory she looked like a person waiting. The French Lieutenant's Woman is a postmodern novel. Fowles wrote a book, based on Victorian novel, with the perception of the twentieth century. Each chapter opens with an epigraph from an important 19th century text, which draws attention to the questions regarding society, economy, religion, science. There are a number of footnotes and narrator's interventions as well as iro...

Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually. Kobayashi Issa Translated by Robert Hass

I found Clapton's book on a bookshelf that stands in the same place since forever I can remember. The room is cold and I sit on a couch wearing my winter gear. "Take it," M says, when she sees me watching the book. "Read it and you can return it later." During the ride home I was thinking about why I took the book. I'll send it back by someone returning there a month or so later, but anyway. I could easily find in it my local library. However, the feeling wouldn't be the same. There's something reckless and cheeky in reading a book belonging to a library more than 800 km away. I almost didn't finish it. At the beginning it seemed like superficial presenting of facts and events, even though I doubted all the time if I saw it correctly. Later I concluded that it was all right the way it was. I guess he wrote what he remembered, what he thought was important and what made the biggest impression. I don't know when the story sucked me in,...

The first time I learned about Anselm Kiefer's Aschenblume was when I was reading its description in a book. It was just a description without a photo reference. It intrigued me enough to find it on the net and now I wish I saw it in all its enormous life size. It's a seascape with the horizon in the middle of the canvas. The water seems heavy, oil like, saturated with earth, dust, ashes, molten metal, fear, pain, memories, nightmares. Above the sea hovers an image reminiscent of a smudge a coffee cup makes when the coffee is spilt and never cleaned. However, it is not that, not a smudge, it's far more concrete, heavy, a mixture of earth, dust, ashes, molten metal, fear, pain, memories, nightmares. It looks as if it's been born out of the sea, from a blue crack in the water of molten metal.  It's not like other seascapes I looked at lately. This painting isn't cold, smelling of salt and water. It's hot, it seems airless due to heath emanating from...

Kratke zgodbe iz Upogiba časa so me prestavile v New York, mesto v katerem nikoli nisem bila, čeprav mi je več ljudi, neodvisno drug od drugega položilo na srce, da naj le grem. Spominjam se razglednice izpred več kot desetih let, na kateri je bila fotografija Empire State Buildinga iz ptičje perspektive. Na drugi strani ni bilo napisanega nič posebnega, samo: "To moraš doživeti!" Nisem še.  Poudarjam "še".  Če se vrnem k Leinim zgodbam ... v njih sem zaznala občutek, kot da bi že bila tam, v New Yorku. Nekaj nostalgičnega je v njih, verjetno v slanem zraku, gorečem nebu, v  ljudeh z vseh koncev sveta, v vonju hrane z vseh koncev sveta. Kot da bi bila zraven, ko je v majhno stanovanje prišla večnamenska črna miza, nadvse pripravna za pisanje, branje ali za sekljanje mlade čebule. In vse to skozi kopreno oranžnega zraka zahajajočega sonca, z vonjem po cimetu in čokoladnih mafinih. Potem so tu pogovori ob kosilu pa predavanja na univerzi in petki v Museum of ...